By Leigh Patterson

Photo by Erika Rich

For the third year in a row, annual charitable giving in the United States added up to more than $300 billion from 2009-2010. At the same time, 63.4 million Americans engaged in some form of volunteering. What makes individuals give in this way? What makes someone generous? Is it religiosity? Cultural upbringing? Gender? Race?

These questions are what Pamela Paxton, sociology and government professor, will set out to discover when she begins a generosity study that has been granted $148,000 by the Science of Generosity initiative at the University of Notre Dame. The project, established in 2009 with a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, aims to examine the breadth of generosity through a number of granted proposals taking place at institutions around the country.

Paxton’s study will investigate the broad causes of generosity across time and location, hoping to reveal the individual and cultural factors that go into making someone more or less likely to exhibit generosity.

The Science of Generosity initiative defines “generosity” as “the virtue of giving good things to others freely and abundantly.” It is conceived as a learned character trait that involves both attitude and action, not as just “a random idea or haphazard behavior but rather, in its mature form, a basic, personal, moral orientation to life.”

Generosity in this form is a complex and new area of study. While the idea of looking at why and how people give has been widely examined, most studies have been from disconnected disciplines, focusing on ideas like volunteerism and philanthropy. Notre Dame’s project notes, “An economist studying the effects of government assistance on charity fundraising, for instance, might never run across a relevant psychological study of why people give or not to charities.”

Another reason why generosity is important to study, Paxton said, is that it avoids debates about concepts such as altruism that are locked in arguments about whether people can ever be truly altruistic or whether altruism ultimately serves an individual’s own interests.

Paxton, who received degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also taught at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research Training Program in Advanced Statistical Techniques and was a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Her areas of professional focus have been on pro-social behaviors such as trust and community.

“A lot of study goes into the problems with society and what is wrong,” she said. “I’ve found that it’s not only more uplifting but also fundamentally important to know why people exhibit positive behaviors.”

In her study, Paxton’s data will come from The World Values Survey, a survey of international attitudes over five time periods, and The European Social Survey, a similar survey of Western and Eastern Europe. In all, her data will examine more than 50 countries spanning the years 1980-2008 with measures addressing how individuals volunteer, provide informal helping and espouse generous values in contrast with other values like materialism.

Most of the work on the actual study will take place at UT with Paxton and a team of graduate students (the project’s co-investigator is based at the University of Iowa). Paxton said she will have her first set of early findings in about a year, but the project could go on for as long as five years. The grant will fund about a year and half of study.

Paxton hopes her study will be able to address how certain traits, like where a person comes from, what their cultural background is and how they were raised, affects an individual’s propensity to exhibit generosity.

She cited the case of living on welfare as an example of a cultural research question: “When people live in places where things are provided by the government, does that provide a model of generosity or crowd out the ability for individuals to be generous?”

Another possible angle is religion. For instance, religious tithing in Christianity or hospitality in the Middle East, which emphasizes the faithful’s duty to God to show generosity toward strangers, the Science of Generosity initiative cites.

Other generosity studies funded by the initiative at the University of California and the University of Virginia look at more microcosmic aspects of generosity, such as generosity in the workplace or in marriage.

Generosity is worth examining because it is a social good that makes society run more smoothly, like trust and cooperation, Paxton said.

“The results could help non-profit and national leaders increase volunteering and charitable giving, and understanding the causes of generosity could help parents, caregivers and educators see how best to instill generous values in children and young adults,” she said.